We are happy Zendesk customers for more than a year now. It is our trusted help desk system. One thing that we saw that was lacking as a feature was a way for customers/users to rate our customer support staff. How well did they answer a support query and left the customer with a positive experience?

So, today, we did a minor tweak and signed up for PollDaddy. Since we have 3 agents, we created 3 polls (with their names on it) and using Zendesk’s trigger feature we included the poll link in the email that is sent to the requester whenever a ticket is solved. Simply click on the link, rate us and close the window.

The reason we started DeskAway was to overcome the limitations of email and spreadsheet-based collaboration when working in teams. Email was never meant for collaboration. It is fantastic for a one to one tool but quite easily breaks down when you start to work with more people. Why not create something simple, powerful yet smart? That is the question we asked back in 2006-07.

Today, we see more and more people take to the web. That is a good thing! Going forward what will work is collaboration systems or online ’social’ software that gives you a central location (think your social network) to collaborate and track your work with your colleagues. The knowledge will not be stored within your inbox but on this central system that can be tapped by any one of your collaborators. This is where collaboration and project management software is moving towards - definitely out of your inbox.

It was great to read our vision nicely laid out in the recent story on Mashable - A World Without Email - One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace.

Sahil Parikh wrote a guest post for GQ India on managing email and using the new Google Priority Inbox…

We were nearing the finishing line and we could taste success. The champagne was in the fridge. Then a few days later it hit us. We’d lost out on the client because of an email that we missed about deadlines. One measly message meant we missed out on a project that could have thrown us into the big league.

So it’s unsurprising that until last week, I would go through all my emails in the constant fear that I would miss something critical amid the mountain of spam. With the advent of smart phones, emails that were once considered work are now mixed with articles stored for reference, grocery lists, new conference notices and desperate salesmen promising first place in search listings.

Read the entire article on the GQ India.

A quick video showing how you can sort your projects by their status from the project listing page in your DeskAway account…

Frozen projects in DeskAway are projects that lack a project lead or a Super user - maybe these guys left the team or company. So, someone needs to get a hold of this project and get it going. Who better than the account owner himself. Here are 2 ways for account owners to get back control of frozen projects (these are shown in black on the project listing page).

1. Click on the ‘Claim this project’ link just below to the project name on the project listing page.

2. If the Account Owner wants to get an access of all the projects which are not assigned to him then the account owner can claim these projects all at once from the settings page.

You can even check out the ‘1 Minute Video Tip - Getting access to all the frozen projects from the settings tab‘ that we blogged a few weeks back.

Hope this helps you take control of frozen projects!